Legacy and Assessment

A sober assessment of St. Nikolai: one of the most influential and beloved churchmen of modern Orthodoxy, and the subject of one of its most serious controversies. This file holds his towering stature and his contested reception together honestly, as the collection has tried to throughout, and adjudicates neither.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

The Towering Stature

By almost any measure Nikolai Velimirović was the most significant Serbian churchman of the twentieth century and one of the most influential figures of modern Orthodoxy. The case for his stature is strong and many-sided.

As a writer, he produced a devotional and homiletic corpus of the first rank: Prayers by the Lake, regarded as a classic of modern Orthodox spiritual literature (see Prayers by the Lake), and the Prologue from Ohrid, one of the most widely used Orthodox devotional books in any language (see The Prologue from Ohrid), together with a vast output of sermons, essays, and letters. As a preacher and orator he earned the epithet of the “Serbian Chrysostom” and a fame that reached the cathedrals of England and America (see Wartime Diplomat). As a pastor he led the Bogomoljci revival, one of the great popular renewals of modern Serbian Orthodoxy (see The God-Worshippers). As a theologian he articulated the Christocentric “philosophy of the God-Man” that his disciple St. Justin (Popović) would systematize and that shaped a whole current of Serbian theology (see The Philosophy of the God-Man; St. Justin (Popović)). And as a confessor he opposed Nazism, was imprisoned and deported to Dachau, and refused to submit to communism, dying in exile (see Imprisonment in Dachau; Exile and Teaching). His influence on the Serbian Church, on the American Orthodox diaspora, and on English-speaking Orthodoxy through his translated writings is deep and continuing. This is why he is venerated, and the veneration is not to be explained away.

The Contested Reception

At the same time, Nikolai is the subject of one of the most serious controversies attaching to any modern Orthodox canonization, and the controversy is not a marginal cavil but a substantial scholarly case. The charge of antisemitism rests on quotable passages across three decades — the 1927 sermon that a contemporary rabbi protested, the 1935 speech with its affirmative reference to Hitler, the 1936 speech, and the extreme passages of the 1944 Words to the Serbian People — and on the association with the collaborator Ljotić and the Hitler medal (see The Charge of Antisemitism). The principal scholar of the case, Jovan Byford, argues not only that the antisemitism is real but that its post-communist rehabilitation and 2003 canonization proceeded by repressing and reframing the record (Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression of Antisemitism, CEU Press, 2008). This case cannot be waved away, and the collection has not tried to.

Nor, however, can the defense be waved away. The most incriminating text is of genuinely contested authorship (Srećko Petrović, Philotheos 2020; see Words to the Serbian People); the distinction between traditional theological anti-Judaism and modern racial antisemitism is real, even if its application to the specific passages is contested; Nikolai was himself a prisoner of the Nazis; and the charge has been entangled in the bitter memory-politics of post-Yugoslav Serbia. Both the case and the defense are serious, and the collection has given each its strongest form.

Holding Both Together

The temptation, faced with such a figure, is to resolve the tension in one direction — to dismiss the controversy as slander against a saint, or to dismiss the sanctity as whitewash of a bigot. This collection has refused both resolutions, on principle and by method.

[Disputed: the overall assessment of Nikolai Velimirović. (a) On the venerating view, he is a great saint, preacher, and confessor whose hard words about Jews are either traditional anti-Judaism, or of contested authorship, or a regrettable but minor shadow on a luminous life, and whose glorification is fully warranted. (b) On the critical view, he is a figure of real gifts whose thought was nonetheless marked by a genuine and consequential antisemitism that his admirers and his Church have refused to confront, so that his canonization is compromised by that refusal. These are not reconcilable into a single verdict, and this collection — governed by METHODOLOGY §4 — does not deliver one. It venerates the saint the Serbian Church has glorified, and it presents the charge against him, and the defense, at full strength, and it leaves the weighing to the reader and to the Church's continuing reception.]

What can be said without adjudication is this. Nikolai was a genuinely great writer and pastor whose devotional works have nourished countless Orthodox Christians and will continue to; the beauty and depth of Prayers by the Lake and the Prologue are not in dispute. He was also a man of his time and place whose fusion of ardent Orthodoxy with a besieged Serbian national identity, and whose reading of a “godless Europe” in need of judgment, issued at certain points in language about Jews that serious scholarship rightly calls antisemitic — whether or not every disputed text is his in the form we have it. Both of these are true, and neither cancels the other. A saint may have sinned gravely, in word or in thought, and the Church’s glorification does not certify his every utterance; a serious sin or a serious error does not by itself dissolve a holiness the Church has recognized. The Orthodox tradition has always known that its saints were sinners, and it has never claimed that canonization is a warrant for every opinion a saint held.

The Value of the Case

Nikolai’s is, for a knowledge base like this one, an unusually instructive case — the counterpart, in the register of the recent and the contested, to the source-critical limit-cases of the ancient saints. It teaches how to venerate honestly: to receive a saint the Church has glorified without pretending he was without fault or his record without shadow; to present a genuine controversy at full strength without either prosecuting or whitewashing; and to leave open what the sources leave open. The alternative — a hagiography that suppresses the controversy, or a polemic that suppresses the sanctity — would be false to the man and false to the method. Held honestly, the two sides of Nikolai are not a scandal to be hidden but a discipline to be practiced: the discipline of a Church that can venerate a saint and still tell the truth about him.

See Also

• Glorification 2003 — the act of glorification and the contest over it
• The Charge of Antisemitism — the controversy at full strength on both sides
• The Philosophy of the God-Man — the theological vision at the root of both the stature and the controversy
• St. Justin (Popović) — the disciple who carried the vision forward
• St. Xenia of Petersburg: Hagiography vs. History — the repository’s model for honest treatment of a contested saint
• METHODOLOGY.md — §4, the both-sides standard the assessment follows

References

• Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The critical case: the reality of the antisemitism and its repression in the rehabilitation and canonization.)
• Petrović, Srećko M. “Is Nicholai Velimirovich the Author of the Book Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window?” Philotheos 20, no. 2 (2020): 260–303. (The contested authorship of the most incriminating text.)
• “Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Charges of Anti-Semitism.” East-West Church Report. eastwestreport.org. (A compact survey of the passages and both sides.)
• Velimirović, Nikolaj. Prayers by the Lake; The Prologue from Ohrid; and the homiletic corpus. (The devotional achievement that grounds the veneration.)
• METHODOLOGY.md §4, this repository. (The both-sides standard governing the assessment.)